All of these articles to date have been about very famous rock ‘n rollers, but this one is a bit different. It’s about Elle Greenwich, of whom you might well say ‘who?’ Well, Elle Greenwich is, in rock ‘n roll terms, the most famous person you’ve never heard of.

 

In the very early years of the Sixties Ellie was a petite and very pretty young lady, just into her twenties, sassy and bright. She had a perfect blonde bouffant hair do, a lovely smile and perfect white teeth. She was also on her way to becoming one of the great writers of pop songs of her generation.

 

Born in Brooklyn in 1940, and brought up mostly on Long Island, she started writing songs at the age of thirteen, and not long after formed a girl group – this in the mid-Fifties, long before The Shirelles, The Dixie Cups and The Chiffons. The three-some, called The Jivettes and lead by Ellie under the name Ellie Gaye, played local gigs around Long Island.

 

She came from a musical family. Her mother was a Roman Catholic who loved singing, and had named her daughter after Eleanor Roosevelt, while her father was Jewish and played the balalaika and the mandolin. She first tried to play a huge Hohner accordion, which had been a present from her father’s relatives in Germany, but though she mastered it, it was too large for her slight frame. She tried to get into the Manhattan School Of Music, but only had the accordion to play at her audition. They rejected her because they didn’t consider that to be a ‘real’ musical instrument, but in retrospect she probably did far better without formal training.

 

Ellie desperately wanted to be in the music business in some capacity in some form or other, but was encouraged to finish High School first – which she did, to the delight of her parents. Indeed, she graduated top of her college with a degree in English. She started a job as an English teacher, again at her parents’ urging, but that lasted less than four weeks. There was no two ways about it; Ellie was going into the pop business, and while singing was always one of her greatest loves, she was destined to be known primarily as a writer. She managed to get a number of her songs recorded, and before she saw her twentieth birthday she had written the great death cult song Tell Laura I Love Her, which Ricky Valance recorded and scored a hit with.

 

A canny move was to get herself a job in the Brill Building, the famous New York musical hot house, in the very heart of Tin Pan Alley. Located at 1619 Broadway, just above Times Square, the building had been completed in 1931 as small offices for modest businesses. Thanks to the Depression, that wasn’t good timing as there weren’t that many small businesses around.

 

Even before the Second World War though it had become an important centre for the music industry. Through its madly rococo golden front doors stepped music publishers, pluggers, producers and, of course, writers and composers. The Brill Building was first known for swing and black-originated jazz and be-bop, and its inhabitants were almost entirely Jewish. Anyone who wanted to do a deal in the music industry only had to step through those flamboyant doors, and would never have to leave.

 

The twenty two year-old Ellie had a wonderful start in that her first job was as secretary to Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. Jerry and Mike weren’t that much older than Ellie – they were still in their twenties, having been born within a few weeks of each other in 1933 – but they had been writing hits for years. They had seen a song of theirs released for the first time as early as 1950, when Jimmy Witherspoon released Real Ugly Woman, and had their first hit two years later with Hard Times, sung by Charlie Brown. Kansas City was a fair-sized hit in the same year (but became a number one in 1959, when it was covered by Wilbert Harrison). And of course Hound Dog, originally written for Big Mama Thornton, was a huge hit for Elvis in 1955. That same year they wrote Black Denim Trousers And Motorcycle Boots, but we’ll come back to the motorcycle connection in a minute.

 

Ellie lost no time at all in letting her bosses know that she intended to do a lot more than the filing and the typing, and they encouraged her song writing talents. The culture in the Brill Building was for writers to work in pairs, and she worked both with Jeff Barry, whose acquaintance she had made even before she got her dream job and to whom she would be married for a short while, and later with the (Jewish) blues singer Doc Pomus (born Jerome Solon Felder) and Tony Powers.

 

The first of Ellie’s songs to hit the charts was This Is It, a slow and sorrowful song of rejection in love, recorded by Jay And The Americans, for whom she would write other successful songs. Leiber and Stoller had written several hits for the band, who had come together as The Harbor Lites in 1959. That was followed by a number of other good, strong songs, but nothing earth shattering – nor anything which would go on to be anyone’s list of the top pop records of all time.

 

That was all to change though. Jerry and Mike decided to pair Elle with a skinny young guy, originally from the Bronx, who was just a few months older than she. Phil Spector was very much a protégé of Leiber and Stoller, and was already enjoying success as both a writer and a producer when Ellie landed. He used the very best of Ellie’s songs to further develop his ‘wall of sound’ technique, which he embarked on with To Know Him Is To Love Him (a number one in 1958). It was to make him one of the most famous record producers in the world, but he was also infamous for pulling guns on people, and – in time – for going on to pull the trigger once he had done so.

 

The collaboration could have been made in heaven. Straight out of the traps they wrote Baby I Love You, Be My Baby, Da Doo Ron Ron and Chapel Of Love for The Ronettes (the first two), The Crystals and The Dixie Cups. They were all black, female harmony vocal groups, and could have been interchangeable; what mattered was the song and the production.

 

It was Ellie who was to go on to write what was, to my mind at least, his greatest song. The magnificent, apocalyptic River Deep, Mountain High was never a hit in the USA, but flew high in the charts in Britain (and in many other countries).            

 

Ellie wrote about teenage love, be it a simple celebration of that love, losing the love, and the fulfilment of the love – usually in getting married. The emotions were absolutely straight forward, and she was unashamedly writing for teenagers as if she was still a teenager herself. She was also one of the very few female songwriters of the time; the other being Carole King, who also worked in the Brill Building. It was, you won’t be surprised to learn – an otherwise male-dominated business, and at a time when ‘the little woman’ was supposed to be at home admiring her new Frigidaire and tickling up her make-up for when her loving hubbie got home from work.

 

Shifting across the gender divide, it’s possible to make parallels with the song writing of Roy Orbison – and if you want an example of that, consider the exuberant, joyful feel of Pretty Woman alongside Ellie’s Do Wah Diddy Diddy; hum them both, one after the other, to see what I mean.

 

Do Wah Diddy Diddy was written for The Ronettes, and though it has been covered, like so many of her songs from this period, by dozens of artists, it’s best known to us as a great Manfred Mann single. Manfred was very good at picking American songs to record, and he certainly wasn’t wrong with this one. It was to be the band’s first number one, both in the UK and the USA, in 1964.

 

Ellie also wrote several timeless songs with the young (four years younger than she) George ‘Shadow’ Morton. He had put together a white vocal group to emulate what Spector had done with black girl groups. His quartet was called The Shangri-Las, and Ellie adapted her style very cleverly. The songs she wrote with Shadow for the group were tougher-edged and went a long way further, in narrative terms, than what she had written for Spector. She wrote The Train from Kansas City, Out In The Streets and, yes, Leader Of The Pack for The Shangri-Las - and co-produced it, and sang backing vocals. It actually adds a bit more of an edge to this, the most famous motorcycle song of all time, that it was written by a woman.

 

As a record producer and vocal arranger (was there no end to this girl’s talents?) she worked with Lesley Gore, Dusty Springfield, Bobby Darin, Lou Christie, Patti Smith, Frank Sinatra, The Electric Light Orchestra … the list just goes on and on. She also can be said to have ‘discovered’ Neil Diamond as a song writer, and encouraged him to perform his own material. Which is exactly what she did herself; it’s not what she is best known for, but she did cut records of her own songs. Ellie greatly admired Dusty Springfield, and in the mid-Sixties harboured an ambition to start a new career as a solo singer, much in Dusty’s style. Nothing came of that though and she was happy to go back to song writing. And more! Her work as a writer of jingles for TV and radio commercials was prodigious, and in more recent times she created a TV sitcom and wrote a stage musical based on Leader Of The Pack, which is a firm favourite in American High Schools and colleges.

 

Now, in the twenty-first century it isn’t that unusual to find a woman working in any one of these different roles in the music industry, but in the Sixties and even the Seventies, it was quite remarkable – but Ellie worked in them all, and all at the same time!

 

Of the craft of writing pop songs she once said, ‘People have to be able to walk away after hearing your record just once and be able to sing something from it. It has to hit an overall emotional button somewhere, even if that emotion is just ‘Let’s dance!’. A record has to be an extension of the emotions.’

 

Of songs such as Do Wah Diddy Diddy and Da Do Ron Ron she said, ‘Basically they’re nursery rhymes. It doesn’t matter what they‘re about; everybody of whatever age can remember them and can sing them’ (though she did admit that Da Do Ron Ron was originally scribbled into the lyric just to mark the beat and was supposed to be replaced later).

 

Whether she was composing, writing film music or jingles for TV commercials, or working as a backing singer, she never stopped. There were still hits too: The York-born disco singer Berri had a hit with Ellie’s The Sunshine After The Rain – originally recorded by Elkie Brooks - in the mid-Nineties, with two separate chart entries – the first reaching number 26, and the second, number four. By the time of her death Ellie’s songs had brought her nearly thirty gold or platinum-selling records, and nigh on forty music industry awards. She had six songs in Rolling Stone’s list of the five hundred greatest songs of all time.

 

Ellie died of a heart attack on August 26 2009, aged 68.

 

ELLIE GREENWICH’S UK TOP TEN COMPOSITIONS

		Position	Artist
And Then He (or She) Kissed Me		39	Gary Glitter
Baby I Love You		8	The Ramones
		8	Dave Edmunds
		11	The Ronettes
		39	Aretha Franklin
		64	TSD
Be My Baby		4	The Ronettes
		6	Vanessa Paradis
Chapel Of Love		22	The Dixie Cups
		75	London Boys
Da Doo Ron Ron		5	The Crystals
Do Wah Diddy Diddy		1	Manfred Mann
Leader Of The Pack		3	The Shangri-Las
		47	Twisted Sister
		60	Joan Collins Fan Club
River Deep, Mountain High		3	Ike & Tina Turner
Today I Met The Boy I’m Gonna Marry			Darlene Love
Why Do Lovers Break Each Other’s Hearts?		89	Showaddywaddy
Chapel Of Love		22	Dixie Cups
		75	London Boys

 

(Yes, I know there’s eleven – but which one could I possibly have left out?)

 

And Then He (She) Kissed Me and By My Baby were both recorded by almost fifty artists in total. Baby I Love You was also recorded by Roberta Flack, Annie Golden, Ellie Greenwich herself, Dennis Hathaway, Bobby Heath, Andy Kim, and Linda Ronstadt – in fact, if I were to list all the acts that had recorded Ellie’s best known songs we’d be knocking on Nick Ward’s door at the end of the magazine before I was finished.

 

GREATEST SONGS NOT RELEASED AS SINGLES OR NOT HITS IN THE UK

		Artist
I Can Hear Music		The Beach Boys
		Larry Lurex (Freddie Mercury)
I’ll Take You Where The Music’s Playing		The Drifters
Look Of Love		Lesley Gore
Out In The Streets		The Shangri-Las
		The Dixie-Cups
		Blondie
Not Too Young To Get Married		Darlene Love
		Bob B Soxx & The Blue Jeans
The Train From Kansas City		The Shangri-Las
What Good Is I Love You?		Dusty Springfield
All Grown Up		The Crystals
I Didn’t Mean To Hurt You		The Shirelles
This Is It		Jay & The Americans